Insights into the residential real estate market

What is RentHub?

RentHub is a residential rental data company that standardizes listings scraped from across the rental market into one, consistent, nationwide schema. It applies natural language processing to pull structured details like rent price, unit size, and amenities out of raw marketing text, so a listing from a small landlord and one from a national property manager end up in the same comparable format.

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What academic researchers should know about RentHub rental data

On Dewey, RentHub publishes a single Rental Data product covering the United States from 2014 to present, refreshed as new listings come in. Each record is a point-in-time listing observation with address, city, neighborhood, and zip code, plus property details such as building type, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and asking rent. RentHub also flags specific amenities like laundry, garage parking, pools, gyms, doormen, and clubhouses, and retains the full marketing description researchers can use for text-based analysis. The dataset runs to more than 540 million listing observations drawn from over 41,000 zip codes nationwide.

Why academic researchers choose RentHub on Dewey

Most rental market research has leaned on list price indices or a single brokerage's inventory, both of which miss the property level detail that explains why two units a block apart rent for different prices. RentHub instead standardizes raw, listing level records across markets and property managers big and small, so researchers can study amenities, unit condition, and marketing language rather than just a metro level average. That standardization work, done through natural language processing on the underlying listing text, is exactly the kind of data cleaning academic teams would otherwise have to do themselves. RentHub pairs well with other Dewey partners for a fuller picture of a property: the U.S. Census Bureau for block group demographics, ClimateCheck for physical climate risk at the same address, and REsimplifi for commercial real estate context in the same market.

RentHub academic research ideas and use cases

• Housing shocks and disaster recovery. Researchers at UCLA's Latino Policy and Politics Institute, including Vinit Mukhija, used RentHub listings alongside rent stabilization registries, fire damage assessments, and construction permits to track the rental market in Altadena, California, before and after the 2025 Eaton Fire, finding that rent stabilized units rented for hundreds of dollars less per month than comparable market rate units before the fire.
• Affordability over a full market cycle. The dataset's zip code level coverage back to 2014 supports tracking asking rents for a given unit type and neighborhood through changes in local minimum wage, transit access, or new construction, to see how quickly rents adjust to local conditions.
• Rent control and zoning policy evaluation. Because RentHub captures individual listings rather than an aggregated index, it can support close before and after comparisons around rent control ordinances, zoning changes, or short term rental restrictions, isolating how a policy shows up in asking rents and amenity mix rather than just a citywide average.
• Text analysis of marketing language. The full marketing description retained on every listing opens up research questions on its own, such as how landlords describe amenities differently across income brackets, or whether listing language itself predicts how quickly a unit rents.

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